Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1422-1492 Italian painter and theorist. His work is the embodiment of rational, calm, monumental painting in the Italian Early Renaissance, an age in which art and science were indissolubly linked through the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. Born two generations before Leonardo da Vinci, Piero was similarly interested in the scientific application of the recently discovered rules of perspective to narrative or devotional painting, especially in fresco, of which he was an imaginative master; and although he was less universally creative than Leonardo and worked in an earlier idiom, he was equally keen to experiment with painting technique. Piero was as adept at resolving problems in Euclid, whose modern rediscovery is largely due to him, as he was at creating serene, memorable figures, whose gestures are as telling and spare as those in the frescoes of Giotto or Masaccio. His tactile, gravely convincing figures are also indebted to the sculpture of Donatello, an equally attentive observer of Classical antiquity. In his best works, such as the frescoes in the Bacci Chapel in S Francesco, Arezzo, there is an ideal balance between his serene, classical compositions and the figures that inhabit them, the whole depicted in a distinctive and economical language. In his autograph works Piero was a perfectionist, creating precise, logical and light-filled images (although analysis of their perspective schemes shows that these were always subordinated to narrative effect). However, he often delegated important passages of works (e.g. the Arezzo frescoes) to an ordinary, even incompetent, assistant.   Related Paintings of Piero della Francesca :. | legend of the true cross | Polyptych of the Misericordia | polyptych of the misericordia | the legend of the true cross, detail | Adoration of the Holy Wood and the Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba |
Related Artists:
Abanindranath Tagore
Indian, 1871-1951,Painter and writer, brother of Gaganendranath Tagore. Intermittently taught by two undistinguished European academicians, Olinto Ghilardy and Charles Palmer, in 1897 he came under the influence of Ernest Binfield Havell (see HAVELL,), art scholar and catalyst of indigenism. Impressed by Mughal and Persian miniatures and the work of the Japanese artists Taikan Yokoyama and Shunso Hishida, who visited India in 1903, Abanindranath discarded Western realism for the stylized naturalism of Japanese art, which suited his poetic temperament, and the general John Ruskin-William Morris thought axis of such early indigenist theorists as Havell and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. His work until the Omar Khayyam illustrations (1906-10; Santiniketan, Nandan Mus.), with their revivalist nationalism and fin-de-siecle affectations, greatly influenced the Neo-Bengal art movement formed chiefly by his pupils at the Calcutta Art School, where he was Vice-principal from 1905 to 1915. His own later work developed an imagist focus. The Arabian Nights series (1930; Calcutta, Babindra-Bharati Soc.), his magnum opus, in which literary and visual antecedents give the image a cultural ambience without intruding on its independence, marks the beginning of modern Indian narrative painting. His aesthetic theories, formulated in lectures he gave as the Vageswari Professor of Art at Calcutta University (1921-9), stressed the role of individual sensibility and imagination in creativity. Induced by his uncle Rabindranath,
Antonio Joli
1700-1777 Italian Antonio Joli Gallery Born in Modena, he first apprenticed with Rafaello Rinaldi. He then worked in Rome with Panini and the Galli-Bibiena studio. He became a painter of stage sets for the theater in Modena and Perugia. By 1735, he had moved to Venice and stayed till 1746, when he traveled to Germany, London (1744-48), and Madrid (1750-54). In London, he decorated the Richmond mansion of the director of the King's Theater at Haymarket, John James Heidegger. He returned to Venice in 1754, where he became on of the founding members of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. He traveled to Naples in 1762, and stayed there until he died.
Berswordt Altar
German Gothic Era Painter, active ca.1400]